I have a situation where a previous technician at my work installed BOINC on a large number of customer computers without the knowledge of his employer, the customers, or the consent of anyone involved.

As the new technician, I've had to clean off BOINC from systems where the uninstaller is deleted to try and prevent removal, and the boinc manager is disabled to prevent it being easily visible.

Browsing around on his profile I came across "Of course, my talk about pride isn’t all that free of irony. My initial reason for running Seti@home was for the science. But as my stats rose, it also became about bragging rights and pride. After all, I am only human.".

So it's obvious that this member not only has no regard for employers, customers, but also for other contributers to the projects whom he feels he should have bragging rights over. It's the last straw, how do I report this account and prevent the computers listed under this account from receiving new data to process?

Will preventing the machines from receiving new data also prevent them from running at 100% usage 100% of the time? This has already caused issues for some of the machines it's been installed on (SFF cases like shuttles).

Please respond back to me via email.

How about downloading the latest update, being 5.8.11. Run the install to get all the files, including the uninstall ones, but don't let BOINC restart on the last screen. Running the install again gets the option to repair or Uninstall, which should then allow you to remove it from these systems.
Part of the licence is about pemission from the machine owners so the previous guy shouldn't have installed Boinc on these machines without that permission.

Thanks for the help Ray.

Unfortunately, it's not going to bring the 40~60 machines he did this to in for me to repair. I can clean out the system files and registry entries without the installer (though that would make it a lot nicer :). My real problem is that over a series of months, he did this to a number of machines we have no records for, and I need those machines to stop running boinc. It's slowing their systems, unfair to them; and to other contributors donating their time legitimately.

Is this possible and who do I contact?

For starters, it's not slowing the systems, BOINC is designed not to.

And, contact SETI admins if SETI was the project involved. There is nothing we can do from BOINC, clients don't contact any BOINC server.

Thank you Ageless. I'll send the email tonight.

Re: Nicolas; I know Boinc is designed not to slow the system down. Nothing is perfect however. Whether due to heat, or the specific settings applied to the client, seven or eight of the dozen or so systems I've cleaned ran like absolute slugs, four or five were still very responsive. Half of those slugs sped up after removing boinc, the other half were still terminally crippled even after the CPU was freed up, obviously there were other things going on with these systems. I know there were a bunch of other tweaks applied, mostly benevolent things like GRC's raw socket lock, but also a number of other things I have absolutely no idea about.


For the record, I think boinc is a great project, and if he'd mentioned to clients that they can donate to science using their computers and they'd agreed; that would be commendable. That's not the case however.

He was also in breach with the first rule of BOINC:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/info.php says:

Run BOINC only on authorized computers

Run BOINC only on computers that you own, or for which you have obtained the owner's permission. Some companies and schools have policies that prohibit using their computers for BOINC-based projects.


If the owners didn't even know about it and he was running for a project on their computers in his own name, then he should be stripped of those computers and those credits. A complete ban, as it were.

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